Effectiveness of the coastal and marine conservation initiatives in Bangladesh: analyzing the drawbacks of the legal, policy, and institutional framework

ABSTRACT The study attempted to identify the challenges and threats to coastal and marine conservation and assessed the effectiveness of the existing legal, policy, and institutional frameworks in this regard. This multidisciplinary research used both primary and secondary data. It was revealed that in the protected areas, both conservations and degradations go hand in hand, indicating the ineffectiveness of regulatory schemes. Ironically, many destructive activities like wetland poisoning, onslaught wildlife poaching, and clear felling of mangrove tree species threaten conservation initiatives in the coastal habitats. There is no specific law and policy which can effectively regulate marine and coastal resource management and conservation. Instead, many fragmented laws and policies created jurisdictional overlapping, followed by interest conflicts in most cases. The study recommends legal and institutional reforms to abolish jurisdictional overlapping and establish effective marine governance. The study proposed a model of an evidence-based national marine policy based on stakeholders’ perceptions.